A disrespectful Afrikaans expression refers to a person seeing their gat or backside. It means to get one’s comeuppance. In last week’s South African 2024 general elections, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) saw its gat and the only remaining …
Is black trauma porn over?
Monk Ellison, a struggling black college professor, writes My Pafology as a prank: the stereotype-laden novel is a clapback at the publishers who equate “Black stories” with tropes of poverty, brutality, and violence.
But the joke, as it turns out, …
Gen Z’s radical race politics
It’s a dreary day in a provincial English town. A tracksuit-wearing teenage boy affecting an exaggerated version of the “Jafaican”, which has replaced Cockney as the capital’s working-class dialect, asks a similarly dressed individual: “What nationality is the best to …
Why women and minorities are buying guns
Guns have been tied to American identity ever since the nation declared independence. But from Buffalo Bill to Rambo, the rugged, gun-toting individual has been mythologised by the gun lobby almost exclusively as a white male. And this myth was …
The Asian-American class war
In the metropolises of the West, shops that sell bubble tea — or boba, as it is commonly known — have proliferated over the past few years, a microcosm of the boom in East Asian cultural exports. At the same …
Affirmative action’s fatal flaw
Say what you like about progressives in America and their nebulous calls for “racial equity”, but they got one thing right: college admissions have always been a zero-sum game. With limited places at the prestigious universities and tens of millions …
The fantasy of dating a Republican
More than 20 years before the advent of Tinder, an MTV show called Singled Out offered an unwittingly prescient insight into the dangers of algorithmic dating. The premise was simple: a dating pool of 50 potential suitors milled around in …
South Africa’s infinite humiliation
Olive Schreiner, the South African author of The Story of an African Farm, surveyed her Edwardian society as an impoverished exile in London in a letter to a lifelong friend, John X Merriman. “A dead pall rests over the whole …
The betrayal of white working-class men
Cards on the table: I’m a rampant opponent of white, bourgeois, male privilege. Events such as the Coronation, or another Biden-Trump stand-off, pull this lunacy into sharp focus. Yes, these ludicrous and deranged media-driven circuses may have little to do …
Edward Blum: My battle against affirmative action
Is it all over for affirmative action? Edward Blum, a 71-year-old conservative legal strategist, has spent decades campaigning against “race-conscious” university admissions policies (also known as positive discrimination) in the United States, which, he has argued, disadvantage high-achieving Asian Americans. …
Race is a status game
Growing up the son of a Nigerian father and Polish mother in Lagos, I often wondered what the real root of racial inequality was. Watching movies about the US civil rights movement with my father it was clear to me …
Stop trying to make ‘digital blackface’ happen
Sweet Brown is wearing a tie-dyed tank top, a scarf knotted around her short dark hair. She’s talking to the camera like it’s someone she knows intimately, telling the story of her brush with death: “I said, oh lord Jesus, …
Lionel Shriver: ‘I benefited from wokeness’
Lionel Shriver visited The UnHerd Club this week to talk about sensitivity readers, the cowardice that’s infected publishing, and why she’s determined to keep offending people. Below is an edited transcript of her conversation with Katie Law, UnHerd’s Books Editor.…
The martyring of Scott Adams
Picture this: it is 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, and the Witchfinder General is patrolling the area in search of accused witches. The bodies of the women most recently found guilty are still hanging by their necks from the gallows; tensions …
The death of historical truth
A number of intolerant ideologies have swept through the worlds of learning, literature and the visual and performing arts over the past two decades. I am concerned with one of them. Its essential feature is the diversion of academic disciplines …